At the beginning of each semester at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, students are registering in droves for one of their school’s most popular courses. The Death Class: A Story About Life, a new book by journalist and Atlantic contributor Erika Hayasaki, takes an inside look at the class—“Death in Perspective,” taught by Dr. Norma Bowe—that has drawn such a large waiting list that students may wait up to three years for a seat. Currently an assistant professor in the Literary Journalism Department at the University of California, Irvine, Hayasaki has written about death for years, starting in college when she began writing obits for a local paper in Illinois, and later becoming a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Since then, she’s written about death from many angles, on both a large and a small scale, exploring how we remember ones we’ve lost. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

What was your experience like writing about death—including homicides, suicides, mass shootings—for the Los Angeles Times?

You’re covering such intense stories, and you’re thrown into it right away. You cover drive-by shootings, and not just from afar. You’re going to the house and interviewing family members of the dead kid. It put me in the middle of the scene. It was a major metropolitan newspaper, where every week there was some different death-related story, from train crashes from shootings to you-name-it. September 11th happened the year I was hired at the Los Angeles Times. I was reporting in L.A., but I called families whose loved ones had been on the flights. I spoke to a family who was waiting for grandparents to arrive, and never came. That was just part of my daily life. That was my introduction.

Did you have any formal training on how to write about death?

Never. But now, I teach some of the lessons I learned about death from Dr. Norma Bowe in my journalism class. I once took students to a program on campus where people donate their bodies to medical science. They interviewed the guy who runs it, who used to be a funeral home embalmer. They had dead bodies lying out that had just come in and were getting to prep them. I had the students observe and write about it. My students also went to visit local hospice centers to interview people who were actually dying. Some of the hospice patients actually died while my students were writing the stories. It was an intense situation, but it was reality. We talk a lot about those moments and how to write about them in a sensitive way and how to deal with it. I don’t think most journalism schools spend an entire class on how to deal with death.

You’ve written about mass tragedies like 9/11 and the Virginia Tech shootings. When did you start to realize that this kind of reporting was taking a toll on you?

When you’re reporting, you’re just living in the moment. You do what you have to do. And, personally, there’s a separation. Virginia Tech happens and you jump on a plane and go. You think about everything after. Around that time period, my stress levels were really high. The stress of what’s going to happen to newspapers in the future, jumping on planes every week, and the magnitude of the events I was covering. I had plane-crash nightmares weekly. I had a fear of flying even though I flew all the time. Every time something happened on the news I had to make sure it wasn’t happening near somebody I loved.

The thing about being a journalist is that you see these things all the time, and you realize there’s no reason it couldn’t happen to you or your family. I had no way to deal with that. In Newark, New Jersey, I covered the funerals of three kids who had been executed in a schoolyard. Lined up and shot in the back of the head. I went to each of their funerals in one day. One, after another, after another. I don’t know how reporters deal with it. But it was taking a toll on me in terms of stress, anxiety, and death anxiety. I didn’t have an outlet. I tried yoga, but that didn’t work. I tried therapy for a little bit, but nothing was really working to sort out all of these emotions.

You wrote a feature story for the Los Angeles Times on Dr. Norma Bowe’s “Death in Perspective” course, and then ended up shadowing her to write this book. What was it about Dr. Bowe that was so compelling?

Norma is highly loved, first of all. Her students adore her, which you don’t see all the time with professors. She went above and beyond. It wasn’t just in the classroom; she was available at all hours. She doesn’t really turn off. And she didn’t just lecture, she had a way of engaging. She would make the class discussions into lessons. She drew from her medical expertise or her nursing experience, or working with psych patients. This was not a class where you would just sit and listen to a teacher—you went into the field. And for me, as a reporter, being out in the field is a big deal. Those are the stories I like to write.

Did you participate?

For my first story, I was just observing. But when I decided to stick with it, I became part of the class. I did all of the assignments, I participated in discussions, I went on the field trips. The students all knew I was a journalist, but they also knew that I was part of the class.

What kind of exercises did you do in the class?

On the first day of class, Norma asks students to write a goodbye letter to someone or something they’ve lost. I wrote mine to my friend Sangeeta, who was killed when we were in high school. I hadn’t revisited that, in that way, since it happened. I hadn’t thought about how it might’ve affected my reporting later, on such intense events, or even my devotion to reporting those events. The stories that I am always drawn to, about death, are stories that I go out and pursue. What was driving me to pursue these stories? I never thought about that. I went to Virginia Tech, but I stayed for several weeks because I wanted to get inside the minds of some of the students who were there. When a lot of the media had left, I was still there. Why did I do that? Was it just for a good story? I don’t think so. I think there was something more driving it. I hadn’t put that together until I took the class and started exploring.

I did the goodbye letter, and got choked up in front of the class reading it. I went through the emotions and experiences like everyone else. That made all the difference. I couldn’t sit back and be a fly on the wall–I had to force myself to be emotional. That was very different for me, but it was good for me.

Were others in the class drawn to it for the same reasons you were?

Oh yeah. On the first day of class, we went around the room and everyone talked about why they were taking the class. Not everyone shares their most personal experience at that moment, but some do. One student, a big, football-player guy, talked about his brother who committed suicide, hung himself. He just broke down; that’s why he was in the class. And then the next student’s mother died of cancer when she was 12. Everybody had a story, and a lot of them brought that to class on the first day. They were grappling with death.

Related Story

In your book, you focus on individual students’ stories—but instead of focusing on death, their stories seem to contain, at the core, a message about how to live.

In the journalism world, especially, we cover tragedy but don’t often revisit it. But here were people who went through incredible hardships, and they’re still here. What’s inspiring is that they’re doing really positive things with their lives. They’ve taken tragedies and turned them into something that gave their lives meaning. I think there’s a lesson in that. Every single person is going to go through hardship, and some of us will give up or wallow in it, but we can also take lessons from these characters and apply them to our own lives. If they can get through it, and even become stronger, then we have no excuse. They had resilience, and that’s a big part of the book.

In what ways, specifically, are students changing their lives?

Israel is a great example of that. He was a gang member who nearly killed someone. He got into college but hadn’t figured out what he was going to do. If you meet him today, after that class, his life is about helping other people, giving back. He volunteered at Hurricane Sandy recovery, pulling 12-hour shifts. He did that on his own—this is his life now. He found his purpose through the class, through Norma Bowe. He hadn’t explored or ever talked about these issues, about holding a gun to someone’s head. Or losing somebody he mentored because he told him to get out of the gang and the gang killed him. He hadn’t talked about these things. He was able to apply his life experience to helping other people.

What did the class do for you, personally?

It helped me see that there’s life after tragedy. Thinking about death in an intellectual way, incorporating medical science with philosophy and fieldwork, and exploring many different angles, helped me accept death as part of life. I think I wanted to control death. When it happens, how it happens, who it happens to. And you don’t have any control. That’s a big step in letting go. What do you have control over? Your own life, in the moment. Your relationships. It’s a really hard thing to tell people, and it sounded corny even to me, but the more you make death something that’s not this distant, spooky, horrific thing, but instead make it part of life, it changes your perspective. People will start to think that way when they’re older, or have a terminal illness, but why not think that way when you’re young? Why not realize it? I’m not going to say that I’m embracing death, that I’m not scared, or that I’m completely comfortable, but I definitely have a decreased level of anxiety and embraced it as a reality.

Do you think kids should start learning about death even earlier?

I do. They know what’s happening. They see what’s on TV. They know about Sandy Hook, about 9/11, about the Boston Marathon bombings. To not discuss it in an open way doesn’t give them the benefit of the doubt. Sex Ed is taught early on, so why don’t we teach kids about death?

There are “death cafés,” “death dinners,” a “death salon.” I went to a weekend-long event on death in L.A. that brought in various scholars and other people talking about death. But these things are happening with young people and baby boomers, and it’s clearly a reaction against how our society has traditionally treated death. Death has been so sanitized. We’re afraid to talk about it. That’s changed since the 1960s. Before then, you never had these discussions in the open. But now it’s changing even more. People want open, honest, discussions about it.

What is “death anxiety”?

Death anxiety is the fear of death, and there are different levels of it. Psychologists have developed scales to measure it, and they ask people how much they fear the thought of dying, or their loved ones’ dying, and measure it that way. A lot of the scholars I’ve talked to say that people who have more exposure to death, in a way that’s not the way I was exposed, just covering one death and going on to the next one, but being exposed by thinking about it, discussing it, writing about it, accepting it, had decreased levels of death anxiety. That’s obviously why this class is so great. It’s the chance to do that over a semester.

There was an interesting study examining how people’s death anxiety changed after watching the HBO show, (one of my favorites!), Six Feet Under, which featured a family that owned a funeral home.

Initially, death anxiety increased, but then it went down.

It seems like it was a good way for people to process ordinary death.

Exactly. I love that show too. It was clearly about death, but there was so much more to it. I wonder what the studies would show about people who watch those new shows on zombies! It might change things. That’s part of our cultural approach to death—only seeing the violence in the movies and on TV and in the news. Not seeing all the other parts of it. There was a great article in The Daily Beast on the home funeral movement. People who are taking care of the bodies of loved ones at home instead of giving them to a funeral director. If a person dies in the hospital and you give the body to a funeral director, you don’t see the in-between. You see them in the casket and then they’re gone. That’s the traditional way we do funerals. But home funerals are about families caring for the bodies themselves, dressing the bodies, washing the bodies, staying with the bodies for several days before seeing them off forever. That’s a totally different mentality. If you think about it, you can see why people who do that feel more at peace. They have the chance to say goodbye. And in our current society, you don’t often get that chance. It’s often done behind the scenes. Why shouldn’t we have access to that process? It’s often quite beautiful.

About the Author

Hope Reese is a writer and editor based in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes for The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and The Paris Review. She also hosts a radio podcast for IdeaFestival. Her website is hopereese.com.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)